The Anthropological Discourse on Yemen: A Critique of the Intellectual Vestiges of Orientalism (original) (raw)

This paper seeks to understand the extent to which Orientalism has influenced the anthropological discourse on the Middle East as a whole, and more specifically in the way its tenets have determined the ethnographic appropriation of Yemen's socio-cultural realities. The paper first shows how the Middle East region, which is comprised of a plethora of complex cultures with a highly literate cultural foundations, was reduced to its lowest common denominator in the form of villages and tribes in the ethnographic representation of the region. Second, the paper reviews the tenets of Orientalism as defined by Edward Said in order to assess their relevance to the anthropological discourse on the Middle East, and to demonstrate how these tenets have been incorporated in the anthropology of the region. The paper critiques the position of a prominent anthropologist of Arab descent, Lila Abu-Lughod, who considers Orientalism to be an inapplicable reductionism to the realities of the Middle East. Third, the paper provides a brief genealogy of the "segmentary model", which has dominated the anthropology of the Middle East, and of Yemen especially. Subsequently, the paper discusses the work of three anthropologists who have deployed very differently the segmentary model in their study of Yemeni society: Paul Dresch who is the major protagonist of the use of this model and who deploys an unapologetic tribo-centric discourse with strong anti-modernist implications; Steven Caton's attempt at humanizing without challenging Dresch's approach, by proposing the role of persuasion instead of force, which prevails in the model; and Martha Mundy, who declares her approach to be an attempt at dislodging the tribal prism through which Yemen is encapsulated in the ethnographic discourse. The paper concludes that the ethnographic discourse on Yemen is characterized by an exclusivist focus on tribes, which portrays the country, in terms of its socio-political institutions, as being inexorably stuck in a pre-modern phase, and describes its culture as being essentially an enactment of rules and tradition dating back from the pre-Islamic era.